A Mason's Work

All right, brother, this is one of the cornerstone episodes of this podcast.

And I know it's going to be a cornerstone episode because it's the kind of thing that

we're going to refer to moving forward in future episodes because it's a concept that

is so central to free masonry and probably not as well discussed, but so central to all

of the work we do here to become a better man that I think it's going to be just something

that we come back to.

And so we're going to call this a cornerstone episode.

And this episode is about being one of the 12 in the heramic legend.

You might recall there are 15 fellow craft that enter into conspiracy to kill the grandmaster.

12 of them recant and step away from that plan.

And so you are one of the 12, your day to day life, everything you do is from the perspective

of one of those 12 who looked at their own behavior and decided, hey, this isn't the

way I want to win.

And so when we start talking about what does it mean to look at your own behavior, there's

lots of approaches to do this.

But one of the most effective, and this is where a sort of a book recommendation comes

in as well, is a teleological approach.

And you can learn a lot more about this than you're going to pick up in a five minute

podcast by reading a book.

So welcome to our first book recommendation on the podcast.

It's called The Courage to Be Disliked.

And in this book, they talk quite a bit about understanding that the behavior that you take

on as a man is creating an outcome that is perpetuating that behavior.

It's not about addressing some sort of origin story for what you do.

It's not about diagnosing that my dad was mean to me or my dad was amazing.

And I got beat up at school once by a girl or whatever.

It's not about going back into your past that may be part of an origin story where a behavior

became entrenched.

But it speaks to every behavior that you perform has a something that it's doing for you

in the moment.

It's giving you something.

It's either giving you a positive kind of feedback or positive feeling, dopamine hit,

if you will.

Or it is allowing you to not take on some discomfort.

So it's preventing you from doing something that or realizing a truth that may be uncomfortable.

It may be presenting protecting you from some level of projection.

Whatever the behavior that you are doing that is not furthering your work is delivering

a value to you that facilitates you in not delivering that work.

A lot of folks, for example, get that whole sour grapes kind of vibe where it's like,

well, you know, I could be super successful, but I wasn't born with X, Y and Z. So in order

to make sure that I never get to maybe the amount of money that I need to go to college,

I will instead frivolously spend my money, even though I know it's not the right thing

to do.

It supports the idea that if I went to college and failed, that might be a horrible, horrible

thing.

So you get the idea.

There is a telelogical sort of causality here that the things that you do are reinforcing

some outcome or some prevention of discomfort.

They are yielding positive results, even though they may not be long term positive, they

may be short term sort of safety and comfort positive.

So this gives you a behavioral sort of lens to look at all of your behavior.

And then when you start applying the Masonic symbols, which again is every other episode

we've done so far, you really can start to deconstruct some of the wise and wear-for's

as to why you're not moving in the direction of a life that is good and true and beautiful.

And we'll talk to more of those things in future cornerstone episodes.

But for now, as you are trying to evaluate the behaviors that you do and why you do them

and why do they come from and why do I keep doing these things that seem so self-destructive,

this is perhaps the most effective lens to look at.

Again, the book is the courage to be disliked and it is a kind of a quick primer on

Adlerian psychology.

You don't have to agree with everything that's in there.

I don't necessarily need any of that to be right.

My whole take here is for it to be useful.

And so I find that lens, that approach to understanding my own behavior to be useful.

So I can look at the things and go, why am I doing this and how do I stop?

Jane, get me off this crazy thing and we'll talk more about that next time.